Next to Zaitsev were Bezdidko – a mortar man with narrow shoulders and brown, laughing eyes – and Suleiman Khalimov, a young Uzbek with the thick lips of a child. Then there was Matsegur, a crack-shot who kept having to wipe the sweat off his forehead; he looked like a quiet family-man – anything but a sniper. The other snipers – Shuklin, Tokarev, Manzhulya and Solodkiy – also looked like shy, diffident young lads.
Batyuk cocked his head to one side as he questioned them. He looked more like an inquisitive schoolboy than one of the canniest and most experienced officers in Stalingrad. Everyone's eyes lit up when he started talking, in Ukrainian, to Bezdidko; they were expecting some good jokes.
'Well, Bezdidko, how's it been?'
'Yesterday I gave the Fritzes a hard time, comrade Lieutenant-Colonel. You already know that. But today I only got five – and I wasted four bombs.'
'Well, you're not in the same class as Shuklin. He put fourteen ranks out of action with one gun.'
'Yes, and that gun was all that was left of his battery.'
'He blew up a German brothel yesterday,' said the handsome Bulatov, blushing.
'I just recorded it as an ordinary bunker.'
'Talking of bunkers,' said Batyuk, 'my door was smashed in yesterday by a mortar-bomb.' He turned to Bezdidko and said reproachfully: 'I thought that son of a bitch Bezdidko was aiming a bit wide.'
Manzhulya, a gun-layer who seemed even quieter than the rest, took a piece of pie and murmured: 'It's good pastry, comrade Lieutenant-Colonel.'
Batyuk tapped his glass with a rifle-cartridge.
'Well, comrades, let's get down to business.'
It was just another production conference – like those held in factories or village mills… Only the people here were not bakers, weavers or tailors, nor were they talking of threshing methods or bread.
Bulatov told them how he had seen a German walking down a path with his arm round a woman. He had made them drop to the ground, and then, before killing them, had let them get up three times, only to force them back to the ground by stirring up clouds of dust an inch or two from their feet.
'He was bending down towards her when I finished him off. They ended up stretched across the path like a cross.'
Bulatov's nonchalance made this story peculiarly horrible. It was quite unlike most soldiers' tales.
'Come on! That's enough of your bullshit, Bulatov!' Zaitsev interrupted.
'That takes my score to seventy-eight,' said Bulatov. 'And I'm not bullshitting. The commissar wouldn't allow me to lie. Here's his signature.'
Krymov wanted to join in the conversation; he wanted to say that among the Germans Bulatov had killed there might well have been workers, revolutionaries, internationalists. It was important to remember this or they'd become mere chauvinists… But he kept quiet. He knew that this kind of thinking was unhelpful, that it would serve only to demoralize the soldiers.
The blond Solodkiy said with a lisp that he'd killed eight Germans yesterday. He added: 'I come from a kolkhoz near Umansk. What the Fascists did in my village is unbelievable. And I haven't got off scot-free myself – I've been wounded three times. That's what's made me a sniper.'
After suggesting very earnestly that it was best to pick a spot along a path the Germans used to fetch water or to go to the kitchen, Tokarev said: 'I'm from Mozhaev. My wife's in occupied territory. I got a letter from her saying what they've been through. They killed my son because of the name I gave him – Vladimir Ilyich.'
'I never hurry,' said Khalimov excitedly. 'I shoot when my heart tells me. I come to the front – Sergeant Gurov my friend. He teach me Russian, I teach him Uzbek. Germans kill him, I kill twelve Germans. I take binoculars from officer and hang them round neck. I carry out your orders, comrade Political Instructor.'
There was something terrible about the reports of these snipers. Krymov had always scorned lily-livered intellectuals, people like Shtrum and Yevgenia Nikolaevna who had made such a to-do over the fate of the kulaks. Referring to 1937, he had told Yevgenia: 'There's nothing wrong with liquidating our enemies; what's terrible is when we shoot our own people.'
Now he felt like saying that he'd always, without the least hesitation, been ready to shoot White Guards, to exterminate Menshevik and SR scum, to liquidate the kulaks, that he had never felt the least pity for enemies of the Revolution, but that it was wrong to rejoice at the killing of German workers. There was something horrible about the way these soldiers talked – even though they knew very well what they were fighting for.
Zaitsev began to tell the story of his battle of wits with a German sniper at the foot of Mamayev Kurgan. It had lasted for days. The German knew Zaitsev was watching him and he himself was keeping watch on Zaitsev. They seemed well-matched; neither could catch the other out.
'He'd already picked off three of our men that day, but I just lay in my ditch. I didn't make a sound. Then he had one more go – his aim was perfect – another of our soldiers fell to the ground with his hands in the air. One of their soldiers went by with some papers. I just lay there and watched… I knew what he'd be thinking – that if I'd been around, I'd have picked off that soldier. And I knew he couldn't see the soldier he'd shot himself – he'd want to have a look. Neither of us moved. Then another German went by with a bucket – not a sound from my ditch. Another fifteen minutes and he started to get to his feet. He stood up. Then I stood up myself…'
Reliving what he'd been through, Zaitsev got up from the table. His face had now assumed the expression Krymov had earlier only glimpsed. Now he was no longer just a good-natured young lad-there was something leonine, something powerful and sinister in his flared nostrils, in his broad forehead, in the triumphant glare of his eyes.
'He realized who I was. And then I shot him.'
There was a moment of silence, probably the same silence that had followed Zaitsev's shot – you could almost hear the dead body falling to the ground. Batyuk suddenly turned to Krymov and asked: 'Well. do you find all this interesting?'
'It's great stuff,' said Krymov – and that was all he said.
Krymov stayed behind after the end of the meeting. Batyuk moved his lips as he counted out some drops for his heart into an empty glass; then he filled it with water. Yawning every now and then, he started to tell Krymov about everyday life in the division. Everything he said seemed to have some bearing on what had happened to him in the first hours of the war; it was as though all his thoughts had developed from that one point.
Ever since he had arrived in Stalingrad, Krymov had had a strange feeling. Sometimes it was as though he were in a kingdom where the Party no longer existed; sometimes he felt he was breathing the air of the first days of the Revolution.
'Have you been a member of the Party for long, comrade Lieutenant-Colonel?' he asked Batyuk abruptly.
'Why do you ask, comrade Commissar? Do you think I'm deviating from the Party line?'
For a moment Krymov didn't answer. Then he said: 'I've always been considered quite a good orator, you know. I've spoken at large workers' meetings. But ever since I arrived here, I've felt that I'm following people rather than guiding them. It's very odd. Just now I wanted to say something to your snipers and then I thought they knew all they needed to know already. Actually, that wasn't the only reason I didn't say anything. We've been told to make the soldiers think of the Red Army as an army of vengeance. This isn't the moment for me to start talking about internationalism or class consciousness. What matters is to mobilize the fury of the masses against the enemy. I don't want to be like the idiot in the story who began reciting the funeral service at a wedding…'